Like all great television, Mad Men was largely about beautiful people treating each other terribly in the service of big philosophical ideas: the rapacity of capitalism, the earthquakes of feminism, racism’s eerie bonhomie, 20th-century American alienation. The show’s genius was to (mostly) avoid prattle. Rare were the Sorkin-y walks and talks. Mad Men showed. Its characters displaced their ambition and inadequacy and nostalgia and fear of death and rage into the objects around them,...